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Bob Frankston, Co-Inventor of the Spreadsheet

Imagine you are the world’s largest operator of shopping malls, and shoppers can only get to your malls via the equivalent of dirt paths and country roads. What’s more, those meager routes are all controlled by an oligopoly of private, toll-road operators that focus on their profitability, not on getting consumers to the stores in your malls.

The result would be a mess. The roads would be slow yet expensive. Consumers would limit shopping trips. The stores in your malls would have a hard time generating business, so your malls would languish.

Yet the entire online economy runs on an analogous network. The network could easily be lightning fast, pervasive and cheap (or even free). Instead, a small group of telecom providers tightly controls relatively dismal access, offering coverage and speeds that are a fraction of what is possible while charging relatively high prices.

As software pioneer Bob Frankston pointed out to me recently, this network is lunacy from a societal standpoint. There may be a solution—and, as the headline suggests, Google could play a major role.

We learned a long time ago that open roads and common infrastructure are vital to community, commerce and innovation. In the U.S. alone, we’ve invested many hundreds of billions on building that infrastructure and make it mostly free at the time of use. According to nationalatlas.gov, there are 3.9 million miles of public roads in the U.S., which annually carry more than 4.7 trillion passenger miles of travel and 3.3 trillion ton miles of domestic freight. Those roads are used by about 270 million people, 6.7 million business establishments and 88,000 units of government. Without good, free roads, just about every person and every economic activity would suffer.

Frankston, the co-inventor of the first electronic spreadsheet, has been arguing in a long series of articles and presentations, that the telecommunications network could be the equivalent of the public roads but, instead, so massively constrains our basic communications capabilities that it puts a drag on community, commerce and overall innovation.

Frankston argues for “ambient connectivity,” where network connectivity is pervasive, abundant and part and parcel of the common infrastructure. Few would disagree with the claim that the digital equivalents of sidewalks, roads and superhighways are becoming crucial. Why not create a world where universal network access is enabled by an openly accessible common infrastructure?

Ambient connectivity would enable a world where users don’t have to negotiate a patchwork of home, mobile and roaming service contracts to be connected, or hope they stumble on a Starbucks, McDonald’s or some other open-minded provider of open WiFi networks.

What’s more, Frankston argues, taking away the necessity to monitor usage and to bill per transaction across redundant networks would have game-changing consequences. The change would simplify the network by eliminating a very complex (and expensive) administrative layer. It would eliminate the cost of building out, maintaining and upgrading multiple infrastructures. It would unlock a tremendous amount of capacity, by encouraging the use of copper and fiber that currently goes unused or underused because it cannot be easily or profitably billed for.

Even more significant, he says, ambient connectivity would unleash innovation. For instance, eliminating the need to negotiate how devices communicate in the “Internet of Things” would simplify how smart devices like pacemakers, thermostats and other tiny or embedded sensors, monitors and cameras can communicate with smart apps. Innovators would have much greater opportunities for improving our lives.

Imagine walking through midtown Manhattan without having to deal with poor Verizon or AT&T signals while seeing scores of locked WiFi networks. Imagine every WiFi signal being free and safe. Imagine no digital divides separating the have-nots from important applications in healthcare and education, including telemedicine and MOOCs. Imagine wearable or implanted health monitors being able to contact your doctor, or call 911, no matter where you or your doctor are, without regard to data plans, carrier signals, network passwords, user agreements and so on.

By the early 20th century, most of the toll roads had been acquired by local governments and integrated into a public road system. Advances in transportation technology required harder and smoother road surfaces and even more roads. Faster automobiles made toll stops more inconvenient. More generally, there was growing awareness that toll roads had become limiters to the indirect benefits that motivated their building. Thus, it was government that stepped up to the next generation of road needs, including the almost 50,000 miles of Interstate Highway System, built at a cost of $490 billion (in 2012 dollars).